Fiction book reviews archive | Page 21 of 451

To read Jesmyn Ward is to be carried by her epic, transformative language to the dark heart of the American South and, once there, to be surprised by the stark beauty of the region’s people. Let Us Descend, the Mississippi author’s fourth novel, brings Ward’s intimate knowledge of place to the pre-Civil War South, where her captivating narrator, teenage girl Annis, is enslaved. A two-time National Book Award winner (2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing), Ward writes in the traditions of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison—but this story is unmistakably her own.

The journey begins at a North Carolina rice plantation owned by the enslaver who fathered Annis through rape. In a shady clearing in the woods, Annis’ mother teaches her to fight, yet their relationship is one of intense tenderness. When the enslaver sells Annis’ mother, our heroine is left grief-wracked. Before long, she too is sold downriver on a harrowing march to the slave markets of New Orleans. In North Carolina, she eavesdropped on her white half-sisters’ lessons about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now, Annis recognizes her own descent through the circles of hell.

Let Us Descend is infused with the supernatural. Spirits approach Annis on her journey, offering protection and oblivion. Astute and intuitive, Annis steels herself against temptation, grounding herself in memories of her mother. The theme of mothering extends to the care Annis offers to and receives from the girls and women around her, which allows the characters to maintain their dignity and assert their humanity. These interactions are a balm not only to Annis but also to the reader. Ward constantly reminds us that oppressed people retain “soft parts” that the evils of slavery can never truly touch.

Though Annis seldom speaks and her dialogue often consists of single, short sentences, her thoughts sing with Ward’s signature lyricism. Ward’s choices of first-person point of view and present tense anchor us in Annis’ imagination. The narrator pictures her mother’s eyes “shriveled to pale raisins”; the ropes that bind her are “abrasive as a cat’s tongue on my open wrists”; a dying man is “a tunneling worm, shifting the earth above him.” These vivid observations and poetic interpretations express her resistance against bondage, her abiding understanding of beauty and her will to survive.

We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Ward’s reimagining of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.

We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.

Family Saga, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western

Fiction Western Historical Fiction Family Saga

Straw Dogs of the Universe

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Ye Chun’s ambitious first novel, Straw Dogs of the Universe presents a concise dramatization of the history of early Chinese immigration to the American West. Many of us know the outlines of this era, which began with the importation of Chinese labor for the construction of the transcontinental railroad and ended with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law to restrict immigration to the U.S. based on race or ethnicity. Using a relatively small number of characters, Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of so many of these immigrants, and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.

The central quest of the novel is for Sixiang to find her father, Guifeng, whom she has never met. Sixiang is 10 years old when her village in Guangdong, China, is destroyed by a flood and subsequent famine. She holds faith in her ability to survive even after her mother, for food and money, trades her to a trafficker who transports her to “Gold Mountain,” a Chinese name for the western U.S. in the period during and after the California Gold Rush. Too young for prostitution, she is sold as a house servant, then taken in by missionaries. After escaping the mission and sheltering with a man who had known her father while working on the railroad, Sixiang begins the journey that takes her into the Sierra near Truckee, California.

In alternate chapters, we learn about the life of Sixiang’s father, Guifeng. Tantalized by his own father’s dream of Gold Mountain, he leaves home and contracts with a railroad building team. On his first and only day in San Francisco, he sees a woman from his village he had loved from afar as a boy, Feiyan, who has been enslaved as a prostitute. Although he is sent the following day to a work site in the Sierra, he continues to obsess over Feiyan, eventually returning to help her escape and later starting a second family with her. But his new life falters when he becomes addicted to opium.

At each juncture of her story, Chun examines both large-scale injustices—Chinese people murdered and their white killers released—and smaller humiliations—a temporary employer finds Sixiang’s name too hard to say and instead calls her “Cindy.” The novel culminates with the expulsion of Chinese immigrants from Truckee, once the second largest Chinatown in the US. It is a time of shock and terror, but for this novel’s protagonists, also a time of adaptation and endurance.

Ye Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of 19th-century Chinese immigrants to the U.S. and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.

Dystopian Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Dystopian Fiction

The Future

Review by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

In 2016, Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, a radical vision of what could happen if women became the physically dominant sex, offered transformative ideas about gender and supremacy. Now, Alderman offers readers a plausible world-to-come in The Future, a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.

As a teenager, Martha Einkorn left her father’s back-to-nature cult on the Northwest coast to become the personal assistant to a powerful social media entrepreneur. Lai Zhen survived the destruction of Hong Kong and a year in a refugee camp to become a survivalist influencer. When these two women meet, the attraction is immediate, but their romance is put on hold as news reports stream in of an impending apocalypse.

The Future is awash with tech billionaires, preppers and an anxious population easily swayed by algorithms. It follows executives Lenk Sketlish, founder of the social network Fantail; Zimri Nommik, who runs the largest online retailer Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who heads Medlar, a leading PC company. These powerful techies have spared no expense to create safe havens for themselves and are ready to leave the rest of the world to face destruction.

The billionaires’ plan is thwarted by a band of rebels led by Martha and Zhen, including Ellen’s nonbinary child Badger Bywater and Zimri’s soon-to-be kicked to the curb wife Selah Nommik, who also happens to be a genius coder. With their combined expertise and shared conviction of bettering our world rather than manipulating it for their own ends, this group may just save civilization after all.

That Alderman keeps the plot moving forward despite constant shifts in perspective and time is a testament to her creative skills as a writer and a game developer. The novel never slides into parody, despite the three rather clever parallels to some of our real-life billionaires and tech leaders. Clearly, Alderman cares deeply about our future and believes that we already have the skills in place to course-correct. By the end of the novel, you might too.

The Future is a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

The Glutton

Review by Matthew Jackson

by Matthew Jackson

There is a particular, fascinating branch of historical fiction devoted to probing the inner depths of individuals so legendary and strange that they border on myths. Such tales can take on all the verisimilitude and tactile detail of more straightforward historical fiction, while also saying something new about the time period depicted and the strange pathways through which we discover the human condition. A.K. Blakemore proves that she is exactly the kind of great storyteller required to pull that off in this tale about one of Revolutionary France’s most puzzling and frightening figures.

The Glutton is the story of Tarare, a young man who became a legend across France in the late 18th century for his seemingly bottomless appetite. Long a fixation for those interested in medical oddities, Tarare’s life is both dark folklore and a documented case of a man who could, and would, eat just about anything. Using contemporary medical accounts of Tarare’s life and condition as a guide, Blakemore picks up this odd man’s story and attempts to chart his journey to gluttony from his impoverished childhood to his days as a street performer to, finally, his death in a hospital bed, overseen by nuns who were both horrified and fascinated by his plight.

Right away, Blakemore walks a fine, brilliant narrative line, establishing Tarare’s infamy in his lifetime, then moving forward with a story that’s simultaneously sympathetic to the character and unflinching in its depiction of how far he’s willing to go in an attempt to sate himself. Though he comes into the world as a sweet, curious boy, he will eventually devour refuse, rotting flesh, and even living flesh. What forces transform Tarare, and what do they say about the society into which he was born?

Blakemore examines these questions while drawing readers deep into the entertaining, propulsive story at the book’s core. The great gift of this novel is that Blakemore somehow never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare. He’s a man, he’s a monster, he’s a frightened boy and he’s a living myth. All of these aspects live through Blakemore’s lyrical, sweeping prose, making The Glutton a stunning, mesmeric novel of uncommon power.

The great gift of this stunning, mesmeric novel is that Blakemore never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare. He's a man, he's a monster, he's a frightened boy, and he's a living myth.

Coming of Age, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Coming of Age

The Happy Couple

Review by Carole V. Bell

by Carole V. Bell

In Naoise Dolan’s addictive, rubbernecking disaster story about love, engaged 20-something Dubliners wrestle with intimacy and commitment as their wedding day approaches.

Oxford-educated Luke’s most striking characteristic is his obvious ambivalence. His fiancée Celine’s most singular trait, apart from being a dedicated, almost single-minded, internationally recognized concert pianist, is her willful denial in the face of Luke’s transgressions. Even Luke marvels that she puts up with him: “You’d think Celine would have seen my early diffidence as a warning. Whatever about the unanswered texts, me literally saying ‘I don’t want a relationship’ is, perhaps, a red flag. But Celine has never met sheet music she couldn’t crack.”

This dynamic is maddening at first. But, like reality television, relational trainwrecks are compelling. The first sign of trouble is that Luke and Celine’s engagement begins, excruciatingly, with what feels like a shrug rather than a decision. Discussing their hypothetical relationship limits, Luke confesses, “if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then . . . .” When Celine attempts to offer reassurance by suggesting that she “probably” wants to be with him forever, as if staring down a dare, Luke asks the question.

Though The Happy Couple will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, its wry voice and cleverly executed Rashomon-like structure, revisiting pivotal events and foundational cracks in Celine and Luke’s relationship from their perspectives as well as those of their closest friends and family, make it a standout. Bit by bit, in lean, ironic prose that packs powerful insight, Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all parties involved, including brilliant sections from the perspectives of Luke’s best man and former boyfriend Archie, and Celine’s sister Phoebe.

We don’t see what Luke is thinking for a long time, and he’s easy to hate when he’s merely reflected in other people’s emotional wreckage. When, after 100 pages, he finally comes into focus, his sensitivity and depth of feeling are shocking. The closer we look, the more human these characters become, and the more it hurts to see Celine and Luke stumble away from each other. Dolan’s challenging and well-crafted rewriting of the marriage plot has much to reveal about love and perspective.

Naoise Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all her characters through a cleverly executed multiperspectival structure that makes The Happy Couple a standout.

Family Saga, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Family Saga

The Liberators

Review by Stephenie Harrison

by Stephenie Harrison

In 2020, E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, rocked readers with its excavation of Koh’s astonishing family history rendered in heart-shattering prose. A tribute to her family, to her Korean roots and to language itself, Koh’s memoir was acclaimed for its tender yet fierce writing, as well as its compassionate and candid exploration of generational trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation and resilience. In her debut novel, The Liberators, Koh revisits these themes through the lens of fiction, unfurling a stirring family odyssey against the backdrop of nearly 40 years of Korean history.

Beginning in the 1980s, The Liberators loosely centers on Insuk and Sungho, a young couple who fall in love and marry in Daejeon, South Korea, but soon flee to the United States in pursuit of a fresh start away from the violence and instability of the military dictatorship. However, even in California, echoes of the conflict between North and South Korea continue to reverberate, deepening fractures in their growing family and in their community. Through the perspectives of numerous narrators—from prison guards to revolutionaries, North Korean defectors and the family dog—we witness the family navigating hardships and happiness over the course of decades, inching closer to a future in which the wounds and sorrows that both isolate and unite them can be healed.

Koh has crafted an intriguing novel of contrasts and complements. It is a deeply intimate family story, interlaced with high-level philosophical discussions of Korean history, politics and identity. At times, the story brims with tragedy and risks tumbling readers into a pit of despair, yet a shimmering undercurrent of hope always remains to offer a reprieve. It is violent and tender, wistful and hopeful, built from small moments and yet sweeping.

In such an ambitious book, it is Koh’s writing—a symphony of vivid imagery and emotion—that binds all the disparate elements together into something that will burrow deep into readers’ hearts and minds. A brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past, The Liberators is another resounding triumph for Koh that is sure to win her new fans, particularly those who prefer introspective novels in which the writing and ideas pack just as much punch as the plot.

Read our interview with E.J. Koh on The Liberators.

The Liberators is another resounding triumph for E.J. Koh: a brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past.

Graphic Novels & Comics, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Graphic Novels & Comics

Transitions

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

French university researcher Anne Marbot thought she was open-minded, until her 19-year-old child, who was assigned female at birth, announced, “I am a boy.” The news, seemingly out of the blue, hit Anne “like a tidal wave,” sweeping “away the comfort of my tidy little life that I was more or less satisfied with.” Before long, a seemingly insurmountable rift develops between the two. Élodie Durand beautifully recounts Anne’s acceptance of her transgender son, Alex, and their journey back to each other in the exceptional graphic novel Transitions: A Mother’s Journey. It’s a fine follow-up to Durand’s graphic memoir, Parenthesis, which described her own odyssey with tumor-related epilepsy.

“Why does my child’s choice seem so difficult for me to accept?” Anne wonders. As a biologist, she looks to science for answers, finding a multitude of examples showing that “our classical scientific conception of male and female isn’t relevant at all.” Whether documenting the biology of clownfish (all born male), or showing helpful scientific diagrams (a visual guide to the gender spectrum), Durand’s illustrations cut to the chase, conveying Anne and Alex’s angst as they navigate their changing relationship with both themselves and each other. Several effective pages are simply masses of dark scribbles, as Anne becomes overwhelmed by fear, anxiety and grief, while Alex lashes out in anger and self-preservation.

Durand also offers informative examples from biology, history and activism, which provide helpful pacing breaks amid the family’s emotional turmoil. Durand is particularly adept at using splashes of color to convey emotions—for example, Anne repeatedly appears as a splash of pink hair, lost amid a growing black cloud that threatens to consume her. One memorable full-page spread shows Anne behind bars, being strangled by a giant serpent of anxiety. Durand also follows Alex’s gradual acceptance by the rest of his family, including his two younger brothers. In a touching scene, Anne breaks the news to her parents, who are immediately supportive of their grandchild. After three years, Anne not only fully embraces Alex, but also becomes an activist for the trans community. What’s more, she changes the way she teaches science, noting, “When I read back my words, I have trouble relating to who I used to be.”

This powerful memoir brings to mind Iris Gottlieb’s excellent Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression. Transitions: A Mother’s Journey is a particularly helpful guide that speaks to a wide audience hoping to gain understanding about transgender transitions. The graphic format makes its heavy emotional content accessible, while Durand’s exquisitely paired text and illustrations bring home the power of this revelatory—and increasingly common—story.

Elodie Durand’s exceptional graphic novel recounts a mother’s acceptance of her transgender son and their journey back to each other.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Tremor

Review by Michael Magras

by Michael Magras

Most people eventually think about the concept of permanence—how one could live on after inevitable death. Some are drawn to photography for what has been, at least until recently, incontrovertible proof of what once existed. But attempts to secure a permanent place in history are often complicated by changes in technology, the prejudices of others, or, in the case of art, the purloining of treasured works. Conflicts like these animate Teju Cole’s dazzling novel of ideas Tremor, his first novel since 2011’s Open City.

Fans of Cole’s work know he is a photographer as well as a writer. His moving, introspective 2017 book of images, Blind Spot, features photos from his worldwide travels. Cole draws from those experiences in Tremor, in which Tunde, the protagonist who, like Cole, is a Harvard professor raised in Nigeria, perpetually examines the tensions of life as a Black man in a white-dominated country where he is never seen as belonging anywhere.

Tremor is split into eight exploratory chapters in which Cole addresses injustices both personal and global. During a talk Tunde gives at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which forms the fifth chapter of the book, he describes the circumstances under which many of their paintings and plaques came into their possession, from the Nazis’ cultural genocide to Britain’s 18-day massacre in Benin in 1897 that led to the expropriation of 4,000 artworks. He ends with “a plea to take restitution seriously, a plea to reimagine the future of the museum.”

In a brilliant extended sequence in the sixth chapter, Cole includes the first-person perspectives of numerous people Tunde interviews during a trip to Nigeria to depict the complexities and struggles of life in that country. Other sections address colonialism and the reluctance of many in the United States to “change their essential faith in American superiority.” Hanging over these discussions is the specter of impending death. A Harvard colleague is diagnosed with colon cancer, and Tunde fears, even in his 40s, signs of his own inevitable decline.

A lesser writer would have turned this into a depressing jeremiad, but Cole makes it a thrilling and important work. During Tunde’s Nigeria visit, one interviewee says, “We have to know how to forget the past in order to make progress into the future.” As Tunde does in his talk, Tremor issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.

In this dazzling novel of ideas, Teju Cole addresses injustices both personal and global, and issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

A Spell of Good Things

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Some of the most fascinating novels explore the tensions between traditional ways of life and the lure of more modern ways of being. This is what roils the plot in Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things. For at least two of its main characters, teenager Ẹniọlá and fledgling doctor Wuraọlá, the tension is all but intolerable.

The story begins in a southwestern state in present-day Nigeria, nearly a year before an election that will usher a corrupt (or even criminal) politician into the governorship. Schools are lousy; students, including Ẹniọlá and his sister, are flogged if their parents don’t pay their school fees. Hospitals are even worse; more than one patient dies in the hospital where Wuraọlá works because of a lack of simple antivirals. There is no safety net, and inequality is atrocious. Ẹniọlá, his mother and sister must beg in the street. The children’s father, fired from his job, is in such a state of despair that he won’t get out of bed. On the other hand, Wuraọlá’s family is well-off enough to pay for her education and throw a lavish party to celebrate her mother’s birthday.

Yet both impoverished Ẹniọlá and financially comfortable Wuraọlá feel hogtied by the traditions of the somewhat matriarchal society in which they were raised. Deference to elders and those in authority is so absolute that Ẹniọlá’s parents don’t even consider going to the school and insisting that the teachers stop beating their kids. Wuraọlá’s profession as a doctor isn’t what warms the cockles of her family’s hearts the most; it’s that she’s getting married before she’s 30.

Ẹniọlá and Wuraọlá are destined to meet, and they do so in the most innocent and pedestrian of ways. But after that first encounter, the events that follow reveal the profound irony of the novel’s title.

Adébáyọ̀ (Stay With Me) has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells. She captures the almost musical speech patterns of her characters and doesn’t trouble to translate snatches of Nigeria’s many languages. The novel’s cast is large, but each character is distinct; you won’t confuse Ẹniọlá’s mother with Wuraọlá’s, even though they’re quite alike. Both suffer, and so do their families.

A Spell of Good Things is a wonderfully written, tragic book.

Ayobami Adebayo has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells in A Spell of Good Things.

Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories

Call and Response

Review by Laura Sackton

by Laura Sackton

In this collection of lightly interconnected stories, Gothataone Moeng invites readers into the lives of people in contemporary Botswana. Her characters, mostly women, are concerned with daily challenges but often consumed by loftier, more existential worries. They ponder what they want and how to get it; they excavate their own histories, looking for patterns; they butt up against (and often reject) societal expectations. All the while, they gossip with friends, fall in and out of love, go to work and complain about the weather.

There is little drama or fanfare in these stories. Instead, Moeng explores intrapersonal dilemmas and cultural changes by writing about the seemingly banal. In straightforward but elegant prose, full of sensory details, she homes in on scenes of ordinary intimacy: Three sisters discuss how to take care of their aging mother. A young woman returning home after a sojourn in America is startled by how much both she and her family have changed. University students muddle their way through first crushes, loves and sexual experiences.

In particular, Moeng beautifully captures the varied textures of marital relationships. In one story, a grieving widow whose mourning period is coming to an end struggles to ease back into the role that her friends and family expect of her. In another story, a married woman unhappily prepares for her husband’s annual visit to his cattle station, revealing the cracks in their marriage and their conflicting expectations and ideas about desire and responsibility.

The unique women in Call and Response all relate to their homes, husbands, families and careers in vastly different ways. Through their stories, Moeng delves into the divide between rural and urban life, the constraints of marriage, the role of education in shaping how people think about the world and so much more. Quiet but powerful, Call and Response illuminates the complexities of a place and the characters who live there. Most of all, it’s about the messy striving and seeking we all do as we move from childhood into adulthood.

Gothataone Moeng’s stories delve into the divide between rural and urban life, the constraints of marriage, the role of education in shaping how people think about the world and so much more.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Endpapers

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

by Sarah McCraw Crow

As Jennifer Savran Kelly’s debut novel, Endpapers, opens, main character Dawn Levit has stalled. She’s in her mid-20s, dissatisfied with her art (she designs, prints and binds handmade books) and unable to make anything new. She’s also feeling stuck in her relationship with Lukas, whom Dawn is pretty sure would love her more if she were a man. Dawn has been exploring her own gender and sexual identities since high school, taking tentative steps to find her way, but she’s still doubting her instincts and herself. Lately, she and Lukas have found comfort in “slipping back into the closet,” where neither has to worry about feeling accepted. But neither of them is content, either.

While at work in the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dawn finds a torn-off paperback cover bearing the title Turn Her About, which depicts a woman looking into a mirror and seeing a man’s face. On the back is a letter handwritten in German; the correspondents’ names (Gertrude and Marta) and Ich liebe dich (“I love you”) are the only words Dawn can understand. But this letter, apparently from the 1940s or ’50s, sends Dawn on a quest to learn more about the pulp novel, and about Gertrude and Marta.

Following Dawn through the spring of 2003, Endpapers depicts a New York City still shrouded in post-9/11 gloom, evoking an uneasy mood and underlining Dawn’s sense that even in early 21st-century New York, being different isn’t safe. Out at a bar one night, Dawn, Lukas and their friend Jae are harassed by two men, which leads to a hate crime that Dawn feels she incited.

Dawn’s introspection is at times painful; she’s young, self-absorbed and prone to missteps with her friends and co-workers. But as the story progresses, the mystery of Gertrude and Marta converges beautifully with the artwork that Dawn begins to conceive. Kelly is a bookbinder and book production editor, and the novel’s details of book and print restoration ground and add depth to Dawn’s story.

Endpapers is a coming-of-age story about growing as an artist and learning to trust and build relationships in a world that doesn’t want to make room for you. Despite its early 2000s setting, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.

Though set in the early 2000s, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Essex Dogs

Review by Matthew Jackson

by Matthew Jackson

For the last decade, Dan Jones has been one of the brightest voices in popular nonfiction and a go-to expert on all things medieval. If you want a thorough yet entertaining look at the making of the Magna Carta, for example, or the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, Jones is one of the first authors you should reach for. But making the leap from nonfiction to fiction isn’t easy, which means Jones’ debut novel carries an air of suspense, even among his longtime fans, to see if he can pull off the transition.

Happily, Essex Dogs is a thoroughly enjoyable achievement that brings medieval warriors to bright, crackling life. The titular Essex Dogs are a group of English mercenaries who land on the beaches of Normandy in 1346, just a few years into the conflict that will eventually be known as the Hundred Years’ War. Like every other English fighter on the beaches, the Dogs seek fortune and glory as hired swords for King Edward III, who’s determined to reclaim France for his domain by any means necessary. But while the nobles leading the army are bent toward that purpose, the everyday work of keeping the war machine going falls to men like the Dogs, whose triumphs and struggles make up the meat of Jones’ intimate story.

The Essex Dogs are anchored by their leader, Loveday, who leads readers through the humdrum days of marching and the often terrifying up-close brutality of real war when the French stop retreating and start defending. There is, of course, an instant credibility to it all that stems from Jones’ other work, but what makes Essex Dogs especially impressive is his focus on character. Loveday and his comrades Pismire, Scotsman, Father and the rest are the true centerpieces of this story, not the war unfolding in the background. Jones keenly understands this, and it allows him to craft a remarkable story about the price of war and the way violence weighs on men’s souls while never losing sight of the sweeping, epic scale of his narrative.

Rich in historical detail and told in tight, endearing prose, Essex Dogs is a historical fiction triumph for both longtime Jones fans and newcomers. It belongs on the reading list of every medieval history buff.

Rich in historical detail and told in tight, endearing prose, Essex Dogs is a historical fiction triumph for both longtime Jones fans and newcomers, and belongs on the reading list of every medieval history buff.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Hungry Ghosts

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Set in Trinidad in the 1940s, Kevin Jared Hosein’s debut novel, Hungry Ghosts, has the mesmerizing power of a tale told on a bone-chilling night. A science teacher living in Trinidad and Tobago, Hosein explains in his author’s note that he drew on Caribbean oral traditions of “ghost stories and dark domestic parables and calcified wisdoms rooted in the bedrock of an island nation.” Inspired by his grandfather’s stories in particular, Hosein captures Trinidad’s lush flora and fauna, as well as its explosive mix of cultures, races and religions, within a novel that slowly but steadily builds toward a climax of Shakespearean proportions.

In the opening chapter, titled “A Gate to Hell,” readers meet four teenage boys performing a blood oath by a river. They name their union “Corbeau, for the vulture, a carrion feeder,” because the bird “must eat corpses for breakfast, knowing to savour bowels and maggoty flesh, realizing those too are meals fit for kings.” At the heart of the novel is the family of one of these boys, Krishna Saroop. They live in a sugar cane estate barrack, one of many “scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse.” The barrack is a “place of lesser lives,” with a yard for communal cooking and five tiny adjacent rooms that house five families who can hear everyone’s sounds and feel the rain dripping through their shared, dilapidated roof. Krishna’s parents are mourning the death of their infant daughter, and his mother, Shweta, prays they can soon buy their own home in the nearby village.

Krishna’s father, Hans, works just up on the hill on the grand estate of Dalton Changoor and his younger wife, Marlee. Their opulent manor is filled with goose-feather cushions and velveteen rugs, and from their box radio drift the sounds of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. One stormy night, Dalton vanishes. Marlee, understandably fearful for her safety, asks kindhearted, fit Hans—with whom she is infatuated—to be her night watchman. It’s an epic setup for a collision of poverty and wealth.

Hosein excels at setting this volatile stage and letting events simmer. Along the way, he delicately explores the often tortured backgrounds of numerous characters in his large cast, revealing their motives and desires. But the heart of Hungry Ghosts is haunted. It’s bleak and visceral, with brutal details of violence and animal cruelty. Readers will long remember this one.

Kevin Jared Hosein captures Trinidad’s lush flora and fauna, as well as its explosive mix of cultures, races and religions, within a novel that slowly but steadily builds toward a climax of Shakespearean proportions.